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Her first impulse was to slap him. How dare he do such a thing!
Instead, she pushed him away; and even though he had grown a lot recently and had reached her height—besides being quite sturdily built—her furious shove made him stumble and propelled him several feet away from her.
"Whoa!" he exclaimed, laughing. Then he saw her face. "Em?... There's no reason to be cross, surely?" His audacity deserting him, he sounded uncertain and defensive. "C'mon, Emily... I only meant to tease you—"
She stood before him, straightening up to her full height—which was considerable for a girl—and, with a scathing look, she slowly and deliberately wiped the back of her hand across her lips. "Never do this again," she said in a low wrathful voice. "Never dare kiss me again, Walter." Then she turned on her heels, leaving the room and her aunt and uncle Watson's house in York Street without a further word. If they were to look for her, let them! It was all Walter's fault. Walter Watson. Her cousin!
Emily Thornton was halfway up to the summit of the hilltop cemetery, when she stopped by the rotunda. Her breath came in quick sharp gasps. Drat those stays! They were pulled so tight these days that she couldn't breathe deeply, and now, combined with the exertion and her indignation, the constriction became almost unbearable. Her face was pale and tears of helplessness and disgust were coursing down her cheeks. She leant against the masonry at the base and hoped desperately that nobody would see her in such a state.
The fury that had driven her to this point was gradually giving way to hurt.
Walter! Of all people... Her cousin, with whom she had grown up and who had been her school mate these past three years. She had looked forward to their last day of lessons together; and after Mr Hurst, their tutor, had left, they had stayed behind in the study, chatting and teasing each other about their future lives and how much they would diverge from this point on—when suddenly, out of the blue, he had lunged at her and kissed her full on the lips.
The thought of it still made her cringe and the repulsion of being so intimately touched by someone she, basically, thought of as a brother was still vivid. Repulsion, tinged with a hint of shame—for having been too stunned, too overcome, by surprise to push him away at once. For that one moment, when she had hesitated and endured his kiss, she despised herself; and so half of her angry reproaches were, in fact, aimed at herself.
My first kiss! It was mine, and mine alone, to bestow—and he has just stolen the privilege from me!
Mirroring her earlier impulse she once again wiped the back of her hand across her lips. Back and forth. Again and again, as if to erase a stain.
She felt tainted and betrayed—and she hated the fact that she was going to pieces over it. As a rule she didn't cry easily. The Thorntons prided themselves on their countenance in the face of adversity—and she was, above all, a Thornton! Better to swallow that stupid hurt and nurse the anger.
And yet... There was no second chance for a first kiss. So, how to find compensation for something that could never be retrieved?
When she entered the yard at Marlborough Mills by the gate house, her tears had dried, but she kept her head lowered, lest the slight puffiness around her eyes betrayed her.
Emily gritted her teeth before pulling the bell at the front door. In a few moments she would encounter her sharp-eyed grandmother who was not to see her distress—because she intended to take her revenge alone, in due time. "An eye for an eye, thief!" she murmured, just before the door was opened by Sarah the parlour maid.
From a scientific point of view, Meret's current occupation at the 'Medical Institute for Metabolic Disorders' was menial; mere grunt work.
Some weeks before, the institute had advertised for patients to volunteer for therapy testing. This had happened by citing the general symptoms in a medical publication; and GPs who thought one of their patients might fit the bill could refer them to the institute. Luckily, response rates had been good. Now, as a first step, they were assessing possible candidates for a—preferably homogenous—test group. The condition in question was AMP deficiency, short for Adenosine Monophosphate Deaminase Deficiency type 1, one of the rare lighter forms of metabolic disorders, although with enough debilitating symptoms to make finding a therapy worthwhile. But, with symptoms being of an unspecific nature, it needed a threefold approach to identify possible candidates. Step one was an extensive questionnaire on symptoms and routines, followed by identifying a possible a lack of ammonia rise after exercise testing. And as the final step the diagnosis was to be confirmed by genetic testing.
The latter was Meret's job; and so, this morning, after a bumpy start following another late night—this time out at a concert—she was busy with sample preparation, turning mucosal swabs into specimens fit for sequencing. Except for the fact that she had to be meticulous in order to avoid cross-contamination, preparing those test plates was hardly intellectually challenging.
Lunchtime and the prospect of another caffeine fix, after already two coffees for breakfast, didn't come a moment too early. Heading for the cafeteria Meret went to pick up Louisa at her office—a rather grand word for the windowless cubicle she occupied—, but on her way she was stopped by the department secretary.
"Someone called for you this morning," she said. "A Mr Paxton. Great voice, by the way... He said not to disturb you, if you were busy, and he left a mobile number to call him back. I mailed it to you." When she saw Meret raise a disbelieving eyebrow, she added, "Anything the matter with that?"
"Not at all, Alicia... I haven't seen it yet, so thanks for letting me know," Meret replied. "Just surprised that Paxton's actually been calling—" At that moment, Louisa lurched out of her cubicle, yawning. "Hi there!" she called out. "Ready for lunch?"
"Hang on. Just need to grab my bag... with you in a mo."
The institute shared a cafeteria with the adjacent polytechnic, therefore they usually timed their lunch break ahead of the interval between lectures and the inevitable influx of noisy students, an arrangement that also gave them the full choice of the available foodstuff.
They found a table by one of the windows. With the institute situated in a suburb atop one of the hills west of Milton, they had a fabulous view of the historic city centre, a sight Meret never grew tired of. Looking out of the window, she was already halfway through her egg-and-cress sandwich, after almost burning her tongue on a huge gulp of black coffee, while Louisa was still suspiciously eying her quinoa salad.
"Do you think this is dairy?" she asked, prodding a dressing-covered piece of lettuce with her fork. She was a vegan.
"Couldn't tell," Meret replied indifferently. "Looks good, though."
"Looks like yoghurt to me," Louisa insisted, tentatively licking at the prongs of her fork. "Well, maybe not—"
"If they said it's vegan, why not believe them?... Anyway, guess what?" Meret said, desirous to change the subject away from Louisa's ever-present dietary restrictions. "I got a return call from that guy Paxton!"
"Who's he?" Louisa looked vaguely puzzled. After their late night she was obviously still running on automatic mode.
"The architect I went to see on Monday, before we met at the pub. Remember, I told you about him?"
"The 'jerk'?—What did he want?" Louisa mumbled in between bites of salad. "This is rather nice, actually," she added, pointing at her bowl.
"Can't say what he wanted... Alicia answered the call—and fairly swooned over his voice when she told me afterwards. I'm to call him back—"
"And?—will you?"
"I think so," Meret said, though hesitantly. "I'd really like to have a look inside that building they're renovating at present. The one I saw the other day... It used to be part of Marlborough Mills. Maybe she even lived there as a child—though it's a long shot."
"Your ancestor?"
"Related by marriage. Yes... Emily Frederiksen, née Thornton."
"So?—What's so special about her?"
"She did an amazing lot of travelling, for a start... During the early 1890s she toured most of the Middle East with her husband, an amateur archaeologist... There are travel reports and essays by him, Ole Frederiksen, published in 1894 by the Danish Geographical Society in Copenhagen, and my father—he's the real genealogy nerd in our family—thinks that Emily must have co-authored them because some of the anthropological stuff was definitely not Ole's field of interest. There's no proof of it, of course... but that's only to be expected, considering the times. And then—she was in her late sixties by then—she seemed to have practised psychology just after the war... but we don't know how that came about—"
"Why's that?"
"Emily and Ole had no children and they moved places quite a lot, apparently... so, most of their belongings, their..."
"Estate?"
"Yes, right... Their estate has gone missing—if there was any to start with... Several letters written by Ole still exist, but none by Emily. But maybe she wasn't in the habit of writing to her Danish family by marriage." Meret shrugged, a little helplessly, sensing that there was little to warrant her interest in Emily Thornton, now that she came to tell about it. "But, look, I've got those photographs of her—"
She pulled out her Smartphone and scrolled through her gallery until she came up with two black-and-white images. "That's her and her husband Ole on their travels—in front of 'The Treasury' at Petra, I believe—and the other one is a much later one, taken in Copenhagen in front of what we believe was her practice. You can just about make out the sign on the wall." Pocketing her mobile again she said, "I've always found her intriguing—my English ancestor—and I'd be thrilled to find out more about her... So—what's the saying?—I'll bite the bullet and give Paxton a call."
"I dare say, he's a big softy, really," Louisa smirked.
Finally, she was on her way to London—and she had taken her revenge! Although Walter had yet to learn about it. The oaf!
The means of her revenge currently lay in her lap. In the inconspicuous guise of a book. But this was not just any book...
Getting an education alongside a boy had been a... well... an 'education' in more than one way. Take the multiple uses of hairpins—and Emily, with her head of heavy raven tresses, had never been short of pins ever since being considered too old to wear her hair down. Mr Hurst, their tutor, had been in the habit of preparing examination papers during his pupils' times of quiet study, and, before he left for the day, he would lock them into the top drawer of the writing desk until the following day's lesson. It had taken Walter and Emily just a couple of tries, with a hairpin bent at the tip, to pick the simple lock.
But the top drawer was not the only lock worth picking in the Watsons' study; there were also the book cabinets, one of them glass-fronted and holding The Book. Like the tree of knowledge smack in the middle of Garden Eden, it had been a temptation impossible to resist once they had been aware of its existence and significance. The rest had been child's play; the lock had given them hardly any more trouble than the drawer.
What the other one, Uncle Watson's special wooden-fronted cabinet, held, Emily had never learnt; Walter—the better picklock of the two of them—claimed that this particular lock had defeated even his talents, but his ears had been suspiciously red when he told her and his eyes shifty. With the superior knowledge of her fifteen-and-a-half years she now understood that the contents of said cabinet must have consisted of 'smutty' books; and she didn't believe for one moment that such books stopped at kissing while not yet married—although Emily felt quite uncertain what 'doing things beyond kissing' actually implied—, but she did believe that they must have given Walter ideas. Not that this was any excuse for his recent conduct!
However, The Book, though not smutty, was nevertheless scandalous and Walter was certainly not to read it, never mind his cousin, who was—after all—just a girl, with the over-excitable brains of her sex. None of this had stopped them; and for the last couple of months they had read it in secret whenever Uncle Watson's absence from Milton prevented them from being found out. As it was, Aunt Frances never supervised their choice of reading matter.
Such a clandestine modus operandi made for slow reading, however, and therefore Emily hadn't managed to finish it in her time at the Watsons' place.
Enter Walter Watson... Two days after his detestable act he had called on her at Marlborough Mills, asking to see both herself and their grandmother—evidently to make sure that Emily wouldn't spurn him—and had given her a book, "To entertain you on the long train journey south." Handing it over he had opened the flap a fraction so that she understood that, rather than a volume of poetry as the jacket implied, weirdly titled Goblin Market and Other Poems—and which she might as well have chucked at him—, it contained something else entirely.
The nerve of him—right under their grandmother's nose!—and only possible at all because Grandmamma was supremely indifferent to reading poetry for pleasure and would never ask to actually look at such a book.
The Book had included a handwritten note by Walter—no apology, just a request to finish it quickly and return it to him before her departure for London. This would not do! An actual apology—even a clumsily worded one—might have softened her to spare him. But by his neglect he had played right into her hands.
And so the volume, rather than be returned to York Street prior to her departure, was travelling with her to London and—unless his apology came forward in time—would travel on to the Continent. She was still giving him a fair chance. Two chances, in fact. One, to do right by her, and the second, that his father might never realise the book was actually missing... After all, Uncle Watson wasn't an avid reader.
In the meantime, Walter would live in fear of detection.
But if The Book was found missing, her uncle would know who to blame. No other member of their household had any obvious interest in the topic. There would be hell to pay for going against Uncle Watson's rules; and with a swift withdrawal of privileges, never abundant for this sickly second son in the first place, to follow.
And Walter would own up to it—say what you will about him, he would neither put the blame on the servants nor on herself, a mere girl.
She shortly wondered how he would explain away the book's continued absence in case of being found out, but then she shrugged it off. "See how you like it, thief," she murmured defiantly, curbing a twinge of conscience.
So, as the train was taking them to London and while her grandmother slumbered in the window seat of their first class compartment, Emily read—and what she was reading bore the title, On the Origins of Species by Charles Darwin, in the second edition of January 1860.
No. Grandmother wouldn't approve of this, had she known. And significant parts of the Anglican church—both high and low—along with her.